ED ‘09 off to a great start…

We’re gearing up for three days of working hard and playing hard when the international Electric December ’09 Steering Group meets next week at Watershed, Bristol, UK.  This is when they’ll make the bulk of the decisions for this year’s project, but here’s a recap of what happened during the first meeting in late July:

To kick off the collaborative curating project for ED ‘09, members of Bristol’s eShed received a ‘reccy’ visit from Marija and Goda from Skalvijos Kino Akademija in Vilnius.  The two came over to get a flavour of Bristol and the project to share with the other four young people in preparation for the workshops at the end of August.

The British and Lithuanian young people started by sharing a bit about what they and their friends do when they’re at home, at school or at work, and Marija brought a load of pictures of her and her friends, as well as a video to give us an idea of what Vilnius is like.  The Bristol people weren’t quite sure where Lithuania actually was, but the ladies were able to point us in the right direction (hint: near Poland, Belarus and Latvia).

Photos from Vilnius

We also began to discuss what the best way might be for the two groups to communicate during the planning period from September to December.  Everyone pretty much agreed that they probably wouldn’t be likely to contribute to a blog, but that they used Facebook often and that it would be easy to keep in touch with each other through a group on that site.

[You might be thinking, but how will we know what’s going on? Have no fear: when the two groups meet again next week each will nominate an editor/journalist who will keep tabs on their progress through this blog.  The two will introduce themselves on here in a week’s time.]

We watched a bunch of films from last year and talked about what we wanted to see in films chosen for Electric December ‘09: some ideas that came up were unique, capturing experience, original, smorgasbord, memorable, inspiring and expressive.

Watching last year's ED films

Finally, both groups got very excited at the prospect of making a trailer for Electric December, and agreed that they’d chat on the Facebook group message board about ideas in the meantime so they could work on it during the August session.

To end a long day, we took Marija and Goda on a ferry ride down the Harbourside and back to show them the sights and sounds of Bristol before tracking down a Bristol-based but world-famous Pieminister Pie which, of course, they loved!

This entry was posted on Tue 18th Aug, 2009.
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